I didn’t always understand my upstairs neighbor Dottie.
She often talked a lot of nonsense.
We lived next to each other for maybe fifteen years
and ten of them, she couldn’t get my name right.
Jon is not a hard name to recall.
I put a placard up in the hall
to provide a context clue.
Eventually she got it right.

A lot of things Dottie said to me
didn’t make a lot of sense,
but for a lot of the time I knew her,
she wasn’t terribly healthy.
Near the end,
she was kind of fevered.

I wasn’t there when they took her to the hospital
so I don’t know what she said
but who was she talking to then?
Her ghost husband?
Her ghost sons?
Her ghost siblings?

She was days away from past tense,
one foot in the grave.
Was my neighbor already listening
to the afterworld?

Or was she just hopped up on pain meds?
I wasn’t there.
Don’t know.